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Chicken Pot-Pie
Prepare the chickens as for fricassee; put your chicken in the pot; place over a slow fire; just before it comes to a boil, skim it well; turn the chicken in order that all the scum may rise, boil up quite hard-season with pepper and salt to your taste. A tender chicken does not require long boiling, therefore you must put your crust into the pot as soon as the chicken boils hard, remembering that the crust will absorb much of the liquor and seasoning. Cut your crusts in pieces of equal size, but do not mould or roll them; lay them on top of the meat so as to cover it; drop bits of butter here and there. Put the lid on the pot closely, in order that no steam will escape-and by no means allow the pot to stop boiling. Boil one hour and serve.
A boiled pot-pie, not a baked one: the "crust" is a rolled biscuit or suet paste dropped onto the simmering bird and steamed under a tight lid. Two things in the original need adjusting, and one needs obeying exactly.
- Keep the lid onThe instruction not to let the pot stop boiling and not to let steam escape is the hinge of the dish. Dumplings cook by trapped steam; lifting the lid to peek drops the temperature and gives you dense, gummy centres. Set the lid, leave it, and time it.
- "Prepare as for fricassee"That means jointing the birds into serving pieces — legs, thighs, wings, breast halved, backbone and neck in for flavour. A white fricassee is not browned first, though brown fricassees also existed under the name. The original says "chickens", plural, without stating a number or size; one 4-5 lb bird will do for four to six people.
- The hour is too longAn hour of hard boiling after the crust goes in will shred the breast meat and reduce the paste to paste. Dumplings on a hard simmer are done in 20-25 minutes; test with a skewer, which should come out clean and dry. The chicken itself needs about 35-45 minutes total at a bare simmer before that.
- "Boil up quite hard"The original does call for a hard boil. A steady simmer with just a few breaking bubbles gives more tender meat and clearer broth, and still produces enough steam for the crust if the lid seals.
- The crustNo recipe is given. A workable one is roughly 2 cups flour, 3 teaspoons baking powder, a teaspoon salt, 1/3 cup butter or chopped suet, and milk to a soft dough. "Do not mould or roll them" means handle it as little as possible — cut squares and drop them, or the gluten tightens.
- Liquid levelThe crust absorbs a great deal, as the original warns, so the chicken should be barely covered with liquid at the start and the pieces of paste should sit on the meat, not float. If they sink into the broth they boil rather than steam.
- Thickening and servingThe original leaves the broth thin. A tablespoon of flour worked into a tablespoon of soft butter, stirred into the liquor around the edges before the crust goes on, gives the gravy body. Serve the pieces of crust on top of the chicken with the gravy spooned over.
Pot-pie in nineteenth-century American usage frequently meant not a pastry-lidded dish from the oven but this: meat stewed in a covered pot with pieces of dough laid on top and steamed. The technique suits kitchens cooking over a single fire or on a stovetop, where baking was often reserved for times the oven was already hot for bread, and it survives in the Pennsylvania Dutch bot boi, where the dough is cut in squares much as it is here. The cross-reference to fricassee is typical of household manuals of the era, which assumed a reader who already knew how to break down a bird and expected recipes to be read as a network rather than one at a time.